Bill Moyers

Billy Don Moyers was born on June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Oklahoma, to John Henry Moyers, a laborer, and Ruby Johnson Moyers. The family moved to Marshall, Texas, where he grew up. At 16 he became a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger, the start of a lifelong career in journalism.

Moyers studied journalism at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote for The Daily Texan and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism in 1956. In 1956 to 1957 he studied church and state at the University of Edinburgh as a Rotary International Fellow. In 1959 he completed a Master of Divinity at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where he also served as Director of Information, and he was a Baptist pastor in Weir, Texas. He had planned a PhD in American studies at the University of Texas before politics intervened.

Moyers joined Lyndon B. Johnson as a summer intern in 1954, worked as a top aide in Johnson's 1960 presidential bid, and was liaison between Johnson and John F. Kennedy in the general election. He helped Sargent Shriver establish the Peace Corps in 1961, rising to deputy director. From November 1963 he was special assistant to President Johnson, helped organise the Great Society task forces, shaped the 1964 campaign, acted as de facto White House chief of staff from October 1964 to July 1965, and was White House press secretary from July 8, 1965, to February 1, 1967.

He was publisher of Newsday from 1967 to 1970. In 1971 he began at PBS with This Week with Bill Moyers, followed by Bill Moyers Journal (1972 to 1981). At CBS News he led CBS Reports (1976 to 1981) and was senior news analyst on the CBS Evening News (1981 to 1986). In 1986 he and Judith Davidson Moyers formed Public Affairs Television, producing about 70 PBS programmes between 1982 and 2006, plus seven Frontline episodes in the 1990s. He was briefly a senior analyst at NBC News in 1995 and first host of MSNBC's Insight. He hosted NOW with Bill Moyers (2002 to 2004), Wide Angle (2005), a revived Bill Moyers Journal (2007 to 2010) and Moyers and Company (2012 to 2015). He launched the Moyers on Democracy podcast in 2020, and Frontline aired his 34-year documentary Two American Families in 2024.

Moyers married Judith Suzanne Davidson, a producer and his longtime creative partner, on December 18, 1954. They had three children and five grandchildren. Their son William Cope Moyers, a former CNN producer and Hazelden Foundation spokesman, wrote about his recovery from addiction in Broken and Broken Open, including letters from his father. Their daughter Suzanne Moyers, a former teacher and editor, wrote the novel 'Til All These Things Be Done. Their son John Moyers helped found TomPaine.com. Moyers lived in Bernardsville, New Jersey, from 2003 to 2016, and was a member of the United Church of Christ.

Trained as a Baptist minister, Moyers carried an interest in faith, myth and ideas through his broadcasting, from conversations with Joseph Campbell to Genesis: A Living Conversation. Politically he was a Democrat and a sharp critic of what he saw as the growing power of money in politics and the corporate structure of US news media. On briefly retiring in 2004 he told the Associated Press that the biggest story of the time was how right-wing media had become a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee, while the mainstream press was focused on the bottom line. In 2006 Molly Ivins and later Ralph Nader urged him to run for president. He did not.

Moyers helped build two American public institutions, the Peace Corps and public broadcasting. He served on the Carnegie Commission whose 1967 report led to the Public Broadcasting Act signed by President Johnson. On PBS he made long-form conversation about ideas, poetry, religion, myth and democracy a fixture of American television. On his death, Press Watch editor Dan Froomkin called him one of the greatest of the greats, and Senator Bernie Sanders said he had the courage to explore issues that many ignored. From 1990 he was president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

Moyers received 26 Emmy nominations and 13 wins, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave him its Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2006. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1995 and received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism the same year. His other honours included a gold baton from the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, a Peabody Award, three George Polk Awards including a Career Award, and the National Humanities Medal. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society and held numerous honorary degrees, including one from the American Film Institute and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 2011.

Books include Listening to America (1971), The Secret Government (1988, with Henry Steele Commager), The Power of Myth (1988, with Joseph Campbell), A World of Ideas (1989) and A World of Ideas II (1990), Healing and the Mind (1993), The Language of Life (1995), Genesis: A Living Conversation (1996), Fooling with Words (1999), Moyers on America (2004), Moyers on Democracy (2008) and Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues (2011). Notable programmes include Rosedale: The Way It Is (1975), Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (1988), Frontline films such as High Crimes and Misdemeanors (1990) and Justice for Sale (1999), Buying the War (2007) and Two American Families (2024). He was portrayed in the 2002 television film Path to War.

As a Johnson aide, Moyers requested FBI name checks on 15 members of Barry Goldwater's staff in 1964 at the President's direction, an episode the Church Committee said in 1975 was confirmed by FBI documents. Under Johnson's direction he also gave J. Edgar Hoover the go-ahead in efforts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. He approved, though did not produce, the 1964 Daisy advertisement against Goldwater. Morley Safer later wrote that Moyers was at least a key bystander when Johnson pressured CBS over Safer's Vietnam reporting, which Moyers attributed to his own critical coverage of later Republican presidents. At PBS, CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson accused NOW of left-wing bias and commissioned an undisclosed study of the show. A 2005 CPB Inspector General report found Tomlinson had violated statutory provisions and the board's ethics code, and he resigned from the board.

Bill Moyers died on June 26, 2025, in New York City at the age of 91. His son William said he died after a long illness at Memorial Sloan Kettering, as reported by PBS News, and his death was attributed to complications related to prostate cancer. Tributes came from PBS, the LBJ Presidential Library, Democracy Now! and Senator Bernie Sanders, among many others.